Quantum Crypto in the Real World

bednarz writes "Swiss officials are using quantum cryptography technology to protect voting ballots cast in the Geneva region of Switzerland during parliamentary elections to be held Oct. 21, marking the first time this type of advanced encryption will be used for election protection purposes. "We would like to provide optimal security conditions for the work of counting the ballots," said Robert Hensler, the Geneva State Chancellor. "In this context, the value added by quantum cryptography concerns not so much protection from outside attempts to interfere as the ability to verify that the data have not been corrupted in transit between entry and storage.""

Comments

They never get it

[goombah99]

Crypto and now Quantum Crypto--theve voting machine folks just never get. Too wrapped in the forest of their own cleverness to see the trees. All these assertions of provable voting miss the entire point of transparency. Voters need to be able to see how it all works. You don't wrap it up in a trust-me-the-math-proves-it burrito and call it transparent. All that does is exclude participation in the process and every time you centralize the cryto it means it takes fewer and fewer people to exploit the hole they forgot to close and don't know about yet. The real solution is to spread the problem out in the sunshine so that even if it allows more people access to fudging things it also takes more people to achieve a significant fudge and the risk of getting caught is higher.

The key thing about voting is this: it's actually unlikely anyone will cheat but every wants to be sure it did not happen. Voting is about convincing the losers they lost not proving who won. it has to be convincing.

Re:They never get it

[causality]

While I can't say I know very much about how this is being implemented, and therefore could only speculate about the threat model and how it is being addressed, I very much appreciate your point about the need for transparency. I would further submit that an aspect of the problem that is not often discussed but certainly does have a strong influence in the outcome of elections and how they affect the country (i.e. the entire point of having a vote) is not so much how the voting is carried out, but who is doing the voting.

I realize how unrealistic it is that this would actually be tried, but what I would really like to see is a restriction that prevents anyone from voting until they demonstrate that they understand how the government actually works. Something like a (hopefully very tough) civics test that must be passed every so often in order to retain the right to vote, with emphasis on what is and what is not the proper role of government. At least in the USA, it seems that just because so-called "literacy tests" were abused for the purpose of denying suffrage to black people, during a time when the evils of open racism were widespread, we threw the baby out with the bathwater and decided to discard the entire idea that a voter should demonstrate some competence before performing such an important duty.

This could work if anyone who meets the other requirements (at least 18 years of age, not a convicted felon, etc.) is eligible to take such a test and maybe it would be a good idea to allow them to re-take the test until they pass. The idea is that with informed voters who understand how the system was intended (by the Founding Fathers) to work, elections would be determined more by a candidate's position on issues, their track record (if available) of how they handled previous positions of power, and whether their ideas are actually sustainable long-term (which many of our entitlement programs are not, such as Social Security and other vote-buying techniques) and less by 30-second ads on TV, campaign slogans, empty promises, and party affiliation. I believe this would also have the effect of selecting against the knee-jerk, ill-considered reaction of valuing security more than freedom and would probably also make it a little easier for candidates who do not belong to the two major parties to win elections beyond the local-government level.

One thing that has always bothered me about politics is the unwillingness to try new ideas to see if they are superior (and if not, why) and abandon them if they are not. It seems that we have too much faith in the status quo and are only ever willing to change it in reaction to some kind of crisis -- often due to skillful use of Problem, Reaction, Solution aka Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis (Hegel) -- by taking measures that wind up being set in stone and very difficult to change in the future.